Top 100 Larry Niven Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Sometimes there’s no point in giving up.”

— Larry Niven

52. “The perversity of the Universe tends towards a maximum.”

— Larry Niven

53. “Once every hundred years, the Los Angeles smog rolls away for a single night, leaving the air as clean as interstellar space. That way the gods can see if Los Angeles is still there. If it is, they roll the smog back so they won’t have to look at it.”

— Larry Niven

54. “Intelligence is just a tool to be used toward a goal, and goals are not always chosen intelligently.”

— Larry Niven

55. “Stupidity is always a capital crime.”

— Larry Niven

56. “We’re looking as far ahead as we can, and we don’t get penalized for mistakes.”

— Larry Niven

57. “I’m not predicting; I just love playing with superconductors.”

— Larry Niven

58. “Love was a delicious blend of warm and cold. There was comfort in making love. It solved no problems: but one could run away from problems.”

— Larry Niven

59. “In the world of words the imagination is one of the forces of nature.”

— Larry Niven

60. “I’d visit the near future, close enough that someone might want to talk to Larry Niven and can figure out the language; distant enough to get me decent medical techniques and a ticket to the Moon.”

— Larry Niven

61. “I do suspect that privacy was a passing fad.”

— Larry Niven

62. “If one must explain a magic trick, one should do so after the show is over.”

— Larry Niven

63. “The brightest minds in our field have been trying to find a definition of science fiction for these past seventy years. The short answer is, science fiction stories are given as possible, not necessarily here and now, but somewhere, sometime.”

— Larry Niven

64. “Spray a book with insect spray, drop it in a bag, add some mothballs and seal it. Put it in another bag and seal it. Another. The packages piled up on the floor, each a book sealed in four plastic envelopes.”

— Larry Niven

65. “As for AIDS, it’s a plague. We are human, we get plagues. They come along every so often, kill off two thirds of the population; in the next generation it’s a quarter; after that it’s a childhood disease.”

— Larry Niven

66. “Anything beats an expensive stack of paper.”

— Larry Niven

67. “The reader has certain rights. He bought your story. Think of this as an implicit contract. He’s entitled to be entertained, instructed, amused; maybe all three. If he quits in the middle, or puts the book down feeling his time has been wasted, you’re in violation.”

— Larry Niven

68. “In general, I don’t know when inspiration will pop up.”

— Larry Niven

69. “I have a kind of psychic invisibility. As long as I can stay scared, I can keep people from seeing me. That’s what we have to count on.”

— Larry Niven

70. “I am trying to prevent a bloodbath. Is that clear enough for you? I’m trying to prevent a civil war that could kill half the people in this world.”

— Larry Niven

71. “I don’t have a strong interest in history.”

— Larry Niven

72. “I’ve got five or six unpublished stories kicking around looking for somebody to buy them.”

— Larry Niven

73. “SF isn’t a genre; SF is the matrix in which genres are embedded, and because the SF field is never going in any one direction at any one time, there is hardly a way to cut it off.”

— Larry Niven

74. “The human species really could have faced global thermonuclear war. During seventy years of Cold War we grew used to it.”

— Larry Niven

75. “My problem with new writers is that it takes me five or six years to memorise the right names.”

— Larry Niven

76. “In a collaboration, each author will do 75% of the work.”

— Larry Niven

77. “It is a cardinal sin to bore the reader.”

— Larry Niven

78. “We should not have assumed that a political space station could be built.”

— Larry Niven

79. “I’ve spent a lot of my life among people brighter than myself.”

— Larry Niven

80. “Jesus Pietro wasn’t used to dealing with ghosts. It would require brand new techniques. Grimly he set out to evolve them.”

— Larry Niven

81. “I do not believe they’ve run out of surprises.”

— Larry Niven

82. “Treat your life like something to be sculpted.”

— Larry Niven

83. “Bruce Sterling is one terrific writer and he’s relatively new, but I don’t know how long he’s been doing it; he probably doesn’t need the publicity anymore!”

— Larry Niven

84. “And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye? Matthew 7:3.”

— Larry Niven

85. “And every friend I’ve got has been writing Mars stories. It was pretty clear I’d never catch up.”

— Larry Niven

86. “You probably used fusion bombs against the Girls.”

— Larry Niven

87. “Gradually he was learning the size, the scale of the Ringworld. It was unpleasant, like all learning processes. He.”

— Larry Niven

88. “Dune; Nova; Double Star; The Corridors of Time; Cat’s Cradle; Half Past Human; Murder in Retrospect; Gideon’s Day; The Red Right Hand; The Trojan Hearse; A Deadly Shade of Gold; Conjure Wife; Rosemary’s Baby; Silverlock; King Conan. He’d packed books not to entertain, nor even to illustrate philosophies of life, but to rebuild civilization.”

— Larry Niven

89. “Nessus sprawled bonelessly in his couch. He looked ridiculously, ludicrously comfortable.”

— Larry Niven

90. “This place is a playground for a questing mind.”

— Larry Niven

91. “He understood when the kzin kitten looked up at its parent and asked, “Is it good to eat?” The adult’s eyes met Louis’s eyes. Louis let his smile widen to show the teeth. The adult said, “No.” In the confidence of four Man-Kzin wars plus some “incidents” – all centuries in the past, but all won by men – Louis grinned and nodded. You tell him, Daddy! Its safer to eat white arsenic than human meat!”

— Larry Niven

92. “Did I still remember how to let my mind play?”

— Larry Niven

93. “God was knocking, and he wanted in bad.”

— Larry Niven

94. “I’ll have to get over this sooner or later, Louis thought. Why not now? A friend had taught him this cantrip, this bit of magic for recovering from shock or grief. Sometimes it worked.”

— Larry Niven

95. “The priest splayed his digits wide. “Herdmaster, I learn. Later I will speak.” “You do not seem pleased.” There was no answer. “A place of puzzles,” Pastempeh-keph said. “They surrender and have not surrendered. Their tapes show rogues acting in collusion. They live neither in herds nor alone. What are they?” “What do they believe themselves to be?” Fistarteh-thuktun asked. “Perhaps that is more important.”

— Larry Niven

96. “Because she was designed human, before Nessus made her something else. Tanj him! Do you see what he did? He created god in his own image, his own idealized image, and he got Teela Brown. “She’s just what any puppeteer would give his soul to be. She can’t be injured. She can’t even be uncomfortable, unless it’s for her own benefit.”

— Larry Niven

97. “It does not disturb me to play a god,” he said. “It disturbs me to play a god badly.”

— Larry Niven

98. “Then you can go home to the puppeteer worlds and tell them that mucking with human breeding habits is a chancy business. Tell them that enough Teela Browns could make a hash of all the laws of probability. Even basic physics is nothing more than probability at the atomic level. Tell them the universe is too complicated a toy for a sensibly cautious being to play with.”

— Larry Niven

99. “Did I just hear something tear?” General Gillespie asked. “It sounded like the Constitution.” Jenny caught the look on Max’s face. Interesting. He looked disgusted. A liberal general? We’re fighting snouts here!”

— Larry Niven

100. “One must travel all the way to the center. To know and hate evil is one path to knowing good.”

— Larry Niven